Day: June 5, 2025

June 2025 SL Web User Group MP, Zero and a general discussion

Posted on by Inara Pey
The Web User Group meeting venue, Denby
The following notes cover the key points from the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday June 4th, 2025. These notes form a summary of the items discussed and is not intended to be a full transcript.

A video of the meeting, recorded by Pantera Północy, is embedded at the end of this summary, with sections of this summary times stamped to the relevant points in the video for those wishing to refer to the audio. My thanks as always to Pantera for recording it and making it available.

 Table of Contents

Meeting Overview

  • The Web User Group exists to provide an opportunity for discussion on Second Life web properties and their related functionalities / features. This includes, but is not limited to: the Marketplace, pages surfaced through the secondlife.com dashboard; the available portals (land, support, etc), and the forums.
  • As a rule, these meetings are conducted:
    • On the first Wednesday of the month and 14:00 SLT.
    • In both Voice and text.
    • At this location.
  • Meetings are open to anyone with a concern / interest in the above topics, and form one of a series of regular / semi-regular User Group meetings conducted by Linden Lab.
  • Dates and times of all current meetings can be found on the Second Life Public Calendar, and descriptions of meetings are defined on the SL wiki.

General Work in Progress

[Video: 1:51-7:18]

  • Marketplace: work is continuing on making the Marketplace more responsive, both with product listings and with using Marketplace search options & the category responses.
  • Downloads page:
    • Work is being put into adding further language translations.
    • The current drop-down for viewer system requirements is going to be updated to point to the main system requirements page, rather than being a separate listing.
    • The addition of Firestorm buttons to the page, and there are no plans at presents to do the same for other TPVs.
      • The reason given for this the volume of users running Firestorm compared to other TPVs.
      • The flipside to this is that including Firestorm on the official download page both gives the impression of “official endorsement” of Firestorm & further funnels users towards that TPV over others.
  • Project Zero: updates are being made to make it easier for people who still have time available on their Project Zero use to get back to their session (also see below).
  • Work that had been going into the back-end infrastructure is now nearing completion, and should free-up resources.
  • SL Wiki:
    • As noted at the SUG meeting, LL are planning to move away from using the mediawiki platform for the SL Wiki to a new service.
    • Some SL Wiki pages have been ported to Readme.com as a test, but no formal decision as to which platform will be used has been made.

Project Zero (SL  in a Browser) Update

[Video: 8:26-10:44]

  • The URL for Zero will be changing to web.secondlife.com.
  • The current page link for Project Zero at the top of the secondlife.com dashboard page is to be replaced by an actual button.
  • The link to Firestorm Zero has been removed.
  • General web page design improvements.
  • Largely non-visible changes to the join flow for incoming users.

General Discussion

Please refer to the video for details on the following.

  • [Video: 12:11-17:09] A discussion on the CasperVend Sales and Coupons options – who uses them and how.
    • Those at the meeting indicated they tend to use both in several ways (e.g. as a means of providing a discount; as a means include a shared item that is bundled across multiple products;  for event sales; for individual item sales in-store, etc.).
    • It was suggested that LL contact the Mainstore Release Discord group to gain broader feedback.
  • [Video 17:36-28:15 – text] Marketplace unavailability: a comments was made about the Marketplace reporting to be “under heavy load” and thus inaccessible to users.
    • This appears to have been the result of the same kind of DDOS / aggressive and improper crawler bots issue has has been affecting the SL Wiki, and steps are being put in place to prevent it recurring.
  • [Video: 28:24-32:10] SL Wiki: syntax highlight is broken (see: [⚠️ URGENT] SL Wiki: syntax highlight is broken *and* in-world access via viewer is down…). This impacts most pages with function pages with example code.
    • This was apparently the result of an update to the version of MediaWiki LL are running, and fixes are in progress.
  • [Video: 32:17-39:51] A questions was asked on why the main image on a Marketplace listing no longer “zooms” when clicked , and why is there are large amount of whitespace between the image and the options on the right side of the listing page.
    • Juniper Linden indicated that previously, the main image was a modal view of the original image uploaded by the merchant, and the “zoom” was simply displaying it at its original size; now the image is displayed directly within it listing at its original size.
    • The image upload size limitation is still, but the hope is to eventually remove it, and simply have a zoom for very large images.
  • General comments on:
  • [Video:54:51-end] A general question: if people had a single poker chip per year to get something in SL fixed, what would they place it on? Responses included: Secondlife.com dashboard refresh; conversations floater overhaul; shape keys; a complete fix for animation constraints.
  • Overlapping with the above were comments on the state of the Events listings (particularly people posting one event multiple times and how to report them), with and agreement from Kali Linden that it is a mess, and could really do with a ground-up rebuild (resources allowing); in terms of reporting, that is to be referred back internally for feedback on the best way to do so.

Next Meeting

  • Wednesday, July 2nd, 2025.